Social Media for Customer Care

With an ever increasing “online generation” and continued proliferation of smart devices, it makes sense that Customer Service follows suit and gets social. Sounds very simple and very obvious right?

The answer to the question of “how” seems to depend on the business vertical in which you operate. The adoption of social media continues across all age groups and sectors, and the content we are sharing is evolving too. Enterprise businesses are making the radical shift to say, “This can be a more efficient way of doing business.”

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, a survey of social media users suggested that speed of response was critical to “social support” success and that the user expectation is to see a response within hours. The article does go on to say that 30 percent of social media users surveyed prefer this technology to using the phone. The financial benefits are clear also, with the study citing a social support interaction costing less than $1, compared to email ($2.50-$5.00) and telephone ($6).

EMC Customer Services is seeing a shift away from traditional telephony toward online tools (which allow the customer to multi-task) and self-help utilities – and all indications are that this adoption will continue to increase. Our customers are looking for real data, real-time, and if it can be specific enough to be presented in 140 characters (for example on Twitter from @EMCsupport), all the better.

As data center infrastructure continues to evolve and grow in complexity, providing our customers with the ability to get technical information quickly and through the channel they prefer is more important than ever. EMC Customer Services operates under an Agile Service model in order to achieve this.

The IT industry is changing faster than most right now and is well positioned to lead yet another change in the traditional customer service toolset. At EMC our customers, partners, and employees make up a critical feedback loop, as the recent EMC Elect program launch shows. Leading the charge is critical – but doing it in a customer-centric, community-defined way, even more so.

About Alan Walsh

Vice President, Global Support Center

Alan has been with EMC (now Dell EMC) since 1995, primarily in Services. Those years give him a unique perspective on the Dell EMC Services portfolio as well as global customers. Alan spent much of his career interacting directly with executive customers in all situations and geographies, and is currently responsible globally for Global Support Center.

Prior to this, Alan had global business leadership roles responsible for Remote Delivery for the EMC Data Protection and Availability portfolio, Unified Storage Division (1000+ team), and proactive customer engagement related to EMC’s Elite Program and Account Management Services. In these roles Alan also worked directly with both EMC and customer executives as needed on business problems and growing customer relationships.

Alan honed his technical, leadership and change management skills within EMC’s Support and Manufacturing organizations, and has applied his deep experience of EMC’s technology to grow the skill sets of both internal and partner service teams.

0 thoughts on “Social Media for Customer Care”

Thanks Alan for bringing attention to our online tools, our social strategy and the EMC Elect. It’s great to see you highlight EMC’s endeavors in focusing on Social Support and the community driven aspect. We in eServices and myself personally see it a something of a brand differentiator for EMC. Great post, thank you.

Beyond the financial benefits and ease of use, the Social Media experience creates a broad community that extends the traditional boundaries of the organization. EMC’s recognition of this opportunity reinforces our commitment to LEAD! Thank you for highlighting this effort Alan.